


The Hollow Cornucopia

by East_Renee



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse
Genre: Canon Universe, F/M, a combination of Beauty and the Beast and the Persephone Hades myth, basically a 'what if Michael and Mallory were trapped together' kind of thing, expect stuff typical of Michael Langdon and Satan, mixed along with some Jesus parallels
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-08-07 07:54:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16404359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/East_Renee/pseuds/East_Renee
Summary: Mallory remembers reading once, from a book in the Academy Collection, a Greek tale of Zeus and his nursing goat, Amaltheia. As a baby, the future King of the Gods had broken off one of Amaltheia’s horns, which had then immediately gained the divine power of providing unending nourishment in the form of flowers, fruit, and corn.The Devil was often portrayed as having horns. She wondered if that meant his son would have them too.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Note: I’m a newcomer to AHS so I’m unfamiliar with a lot of things, but I really love the dynamic between Michael and Mallory, so I thought I’d just give this a try. Hope you enjoy!

Mallory remembers reading once, from a book in the Academy Collection, a Greek tale of Zeus and his nursing goat, Amaltheia. As a baby, the future King of the Gods had broken off one of Amaltheia’s horns, which had then immediately gained the divine power of providing unending nourishment in the form of flowers, fruit, and corn.

The Devil was often portrayed as having horns. She wondered if that meant his son would have them too.

 

* * *

 

 

Standing behind the other women—her sisters? The witches? The coven? —Mallory is still confused. Flashes of her other self are slowly coming back, but it is not so easy to simply discard the past two years and believe in what she thought were dreams and fantasies.

There are two things anchoring her despite her uncertainty; the first being Coco, who is certainly different from before and closer to the Coco in her sparse memories, kinder, brighter, and less shallow. Right before they’d stepped out into the foyer, the girl had tugged Mallory into an earnest hug, not even flinching at the blood and vomit staining their clothes, whispering, “God Mallory I’ve been such a bitch to you all this time! Will you ever forgive me? I mean, I totally understand if you don’t, because god knows _I_ wouldn’t be able to forgive any bitch who treated me like that—”

Mallory had laughed. It had been a bit shaky and weak, but real, and she’d hugged her back. “Yes of course I forgive you Coco,” she’d said, and it was the truth. Even at her worst, Coco had never physically hurt her, and, truth be told, her fussiness and need to be waited hand on foot had helped distract Mallory from everything else unpleasant about this place. That wasn’t to say that her words couldn’t cut deep, but just as she’d told Langdon in what felt like a lifetime ago, she was helpless, and Mallory had always regarded her insults the same way she regarded a child’s. Whatever wounds her words had inflicted were slowly being healed by the memories of the Coco before.

And it’s not like she hasn’t done things in the past two years that she now regrets.

Which led to the second thing anchoring her: Langdon himself. _Michael_ Langdon, she remembers. The Antichrist, who had caused them so much pain. He certainly fits the part right now, looming over them in the rusty glow of crackling fire, his halo of blond hair tinted copper, and his cold eyes accented in red. Said eyes find hers and stare her down so intensely, she wants to run. She feels completely out of her depth. But there is one thing she knows.

 _I’m supposed to fight you_ , she thinks. _Stand up to you_. _To protect what is good in this world. To protect what I love. No matter how this turns out, I have to try._

That is something that rings true both pre- and post-identity whatever and she thinks back to their confrontation in the sitting room, how she wanted to get away, how she wanted to push him back, the release of her powers, freely expressed for what felt like the first time in her life, and _that_ is genuine. If nothing else, she can cling onto the intoxicating yet also frightening display that was their stand-off as proof that her memories are real.

And so, she takes a deep breath and returns Michael’s stare as steadily as she can. His face reveals little, only irritation, and yet she can sense that he is afraid. Of _her._  

 _Because he knows nothing about her_.

She watches, as Michael Langdon raises his arms with a flourish and, without a second thought—

— _pushes back_.

 

* * *

 

 

When Michael comes to, it is to a stabbing headache and the feeling of _her_. He groans and blearily looks around; he is lying down on one of the sofas in the music room of Outpost 3, although—and he realizes this with an increasingly furrowed brow—there is no music playing. _She_ is seated in one of the other chairs, and quickly gets up to walk towards him, arms cautiously outstretched.

“Are you alright?” she asks, her small, mousy face wrinkled in concern, big, doleful eyes and all.

The mere sight of her face annoys him; the fact that she appears perfectly unharmed and in one piece, while he’s here nursing the pain of ten bottles of vodka even more so. He glowers at her and asks, “What did you do to me?”

Her hands fidget and she glances down. “I’m—I’m not quite sure,” she says, “You were about to do something, so I tried to stop you and it was working for a while, but then it got harder and our powers just kind of,” she waves her hands outwards, “exploded.”

Exploded. He leans back, rubbing at his temples, and resists the urge to just kick something. Of course. “Where are the others?” he asks. He can’t feel anyone else’s presence except hers and it’s disconcerting. Fear stabs him in the gut when he thinks of his Ms. Mead and the prospect of losing her again after just getting her back. Despite himself, he relaxes when she answers:

“They’re gone. I told them to run while I was holding you back. Ms. Mead didn’t want to go at first, but I think you ordered her to.” She seems to know that the latter part of her answer is what he cares about, and that too annoys him. It occurs to him suddenly that not only is she, as he suspected, a witch, but that she is also part of Cordelia’s Coven, and that is—

—well that is just unforgivable.

A jerk of his hand sends her crashing into the floor like a wooden doll and another leaves her frozen. He’s about to break her pretty, little neck when he finds that his limbs won’t move off the couch. When he turns to look at her, she’s already looking back, eyes wide and shaken, but most of all, stubborn. They glare at each other and break the enchantments at the same time. Growling, Michael gets up (all the while gritting his teeth at his newly energized headache) and bangs his fist against the table several times. This is by far the most infuriating situation he’s found himself in in years and it truly sets his teeth on edge that this little gray nobody is turning out to be just as powerful as _he_ is.

And he really doesn’t need this right now! Biting back a scream, he drags his fingers down his face. He is this close to succeeding in his mission; the last thing he needs is witches coming to defy him _again._

“Here,” he hears, and he peeks through his fingers to see her holding out a glass of water.

Momentarily speechless, his upbringing takes over. “No, thank you,” he says, with a look of bewilderment, “I don’t want it.”

She seems to acknowledge that with a small nod and takes a step back, before changing her mind and insisting, “You should have some. You don’t look so good.”

 _And whose fault is that?_ “It’s probably poisoned.”

“Oh, you mean with the same poison you put in those apples?” she snarks, “Like I really had the time to do that. But if you won’t believe me…” She tips her head back, gulps down a mouthful, and brandishes the glass before him again, wordlessly.

“It could be a poison that only affects men,” he says.

Huffing in exasperation, she gives up and puts the glass on the table beside him. “Have it your way then. But there’s something else you should know,” she says, and she peers at him cautiously.

He clenches his mouth tight. “What?”

“We…” She hesitates; her eyes dart towards the hall and she clears her throat, “we can’t leave the outpost. I’ve tried. Every time I go out the exit, I end up back in the foyer. I even tried it with you once—”

He doesn’t even stay to listen to the rest. With a roar in his ears, his legs snap up and he rushes up the stairs, down the hallway, flinging open the metal pothole doors of the decontamination room, and charges out the exit. For a second, he sees the dark, sickly green of the radioactive hellscape he created; for a second, he smells death and rot and cancer; for a second, he—

—is back at the foot of the stairs. Mallory is there waiting for him, her stance guarded, but her expression apologetic (though that does nothing but throw more fuel on the fire for him). “I’m sorry,” she says, “I think I might have trapped us in here.”

“ _How_?” he asks. He knows and hates what his voice sounds like. Strangled and upset, like a petulant child.

“I just didn’t want you to hurt anyone in the Coven,” she says quietly, hands balled at her sides, “Or anyone, really. So, I just focused on keeping you here so that the others could get away.”

“But you’ve trapped yourself here with me in the process,” he points out, “I doubt that was your desired outcome.”   

Her lips curve into a faint, bittersweet smile. “Magic does work in strange ways. But it’s worth it. So long as I can keep you down here.”

That does it. He lunges forward to strangle her, but she puts her hands on his and they feel like they’re burning. Stubbornly holding on, he tries to summon up his father’s flames, and flares do burst out from the ground, catching onto her clothes, but they are soon snuffed out with a gust of wind that comes from absolutely nowhere. He is forced back and, with a grunt of pain, he lets go.

They watch each other, his hands shaking from the burning sensation of her magic, her ugly grey dress charred from his flames. He tries to find satisfaction in the fact that even bits of her hair got burnt, leaving frizzy, smoking ends at the side of her head, but he can’t. He can only feel his heart beating erratically in his chest, as it sets in that he really _is_ stuck here.

The wretched bitch responsible for it pants, “You can try to kill me. But I’ll just keep fighting back.”

Anger drives his feet towards her, step by step by step. To her credit, she doesn’t flinch at all when he stops abruptly before her, nor does she back away when he leans down until their faces are but inches apart. He whispers into her ear, “Even if I can’t kill you, I can make your life hell. And until I find a way to get out of here, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

He says that before storming up to his room to see if he still has an internet connection.

 

* * *

 

 

He does, but that’s where the good news ends.

“You said Ms. Meade got away?” Jeff says. His blonde mushroom hair fills up most of the screen, but there are bits of machinery in the background and the constant clicking of a keyboard mixed with his antique ‘soft rock’ playlist. “Hmm I can’t get a reading on her signal though—oh I’m pretty sure she’s not dead,” he hurriedly adds at Michael’s dark expression, “or destroyed since, y’know, she’s a robot and all. It could just be that the signal’s weak, since our network is strongest inside the outposts. Worst case scenario the witches succeeded in deactivating her somehow, but in that case we can just reboot her back up, no problemo. So, let’s focus on getting you out of there first, yeah?

“I don’t think you can help me with that,” says Michael, “I’ll find a way out by myself. Is everything else going according to plan?”

“Yeah, well um, about that,” Jeff smiles nervously, “everything’s going great… _except_ that we’ve lost contact with Outpost 7. We’re not sure why yet, but we’ve sent down some troops to go check it out. I don’t really think it’s anything to worry about—”

“—It’s the witches,” Michael growls, “I thought I killed them all, but they probably found some way to survive. Even Cordelia’s still alive.”

“Ohhhh the Supreme? Oof that’s pretty bad,” says Jeff with a wince, “Should I send reinforcements then? To deal with them?”

“Send them to Outpost 7, but not here,” says Michael, “Once I get out, I’ll have no trouble handling them on my own. I’ll let you know if I need anything.”   

“Got it Boss.” Jeff salutes and the screen turns black.

For a few seconds, Michael stares into space, thinking, and then hurriedly grabs a knife from his belongings.

He needs to consult his father.

Just as he had last time, he lights up some candles, carves up his arms, and begins to call for him.

“Father,” he pleads, “please, I need your guidance.” With stinging cuts, he scrapes his blood onto the cold, tiled floor, and draws a circle. He registers a buzz in his head and breathes in deeply as the natural boundaries blur, allowing him to sink into the threshold of his father’s realm. It is freeing to claim this as his inheritance; it feels right (and he cannot help but scorn at the time he’d wasted chasing other father figures). As his hands move in fluid, practiced motions, something shifts, and he sees himself standing at a precipice, gazing over a chasmic expanse. He knows that in that opaque emptiness is the source of everything and nothing, his origin and his ending, and from it he draws his strength. Through his ears chime droning chants of old, praising his father, worshipping his father, beseeching his father for power and clemency. They chant along to the curdling screams of those down below. When he inhales once more, it is the stench of their blood he identifies, their blood and their death. His whole body is a vessel for their suffering. _More_ , his soul cries, _more._

“Father,” he moans, “the witches, they are all back. Somehow, they are still alive. And one of them, the one who I discovered earlier, has trapped us in here. I try to kill her, but her powers match even mine. What should I do? _Tell me father_.” His arms trail across the floor, completing the reversed pentagram.  

Immediately, the shadows in the room appear to grow darker. They stretch from their crevasses and twist into serpentine shapes towards the lines of blood, solidifying into actual snakes once they came into contact. They slither around him, their slime darkening the bloodstains.  The chanting undulates into dissonance. The flames flicker and his cuts bite into his arms even further.

An image grows in his mind. He sees… thorns. A field of them. Thorns on roses, thorns on shrubs and hedges, thorns on gooseberry plants and hawthorn trees. Bare feet crushing the soil, he treads past those thorns, searching to see where it ends. They are organized in no distinguishable pattern, but they are arranged in rows and as he passes the fifth one something catches his eye, a pale something in the patch of green and black. He crouches down to see a hand, small with slim fingers, partially buried underneath a briar bush. There is a trickle of blood running down one finger and he reaches down to grab it.

Stiff and cold to the touch, the hand comes out from under the dirt easily, but not without some weight—it is still attached to a body, he sees. There is more blood than he expected; not only has the pointer finger been punctured by thorns, but also the palm, and there are large scratches all along the arm. He moves to unbury the rest and is perplexed to find that as the first layer of dirt is shoved aside flickers of light seem to be shining up from underneath. Without warning, a beam of light bursts through the field in front of him, reaching up to the sky. He is forced to close his eyes and just like that, the images fade. Gone is the rough texture of soil and grass, now he is back on smooth, tile floor. His skin is prickling all over to the point of numbness, his naked torso cold to the touch; he dully questions why the vision has ended so quickly, then slowly takes note of the pair of cheap, black shoes within his field of vision. He follows them up two slender legs in torn stockings to the charred hem of a grey dress to a face blanched in confusion and dismay. (A part of him observes that she has taken her hair out of that ridiculous twisted antenna, retying it into a regular bun at the back of her head).

“What are you doing here?” he asks, voice ragged from the ritual. It irks him that she continues to disrupt his endeavors, especially when he’s only engaging in said endeavors to figure out how to kill her. For all that he says he likes a fighter, that only applies when the fighter cannot actually defeat him. It’s the difference between a yapping chihuahua and an angry black bear; with one he can laugh and play with and kill without a second thought, with the other there is the added stressor of possible pain and death, even _if_ the adrenaline rush is nice.

 “I could sense that you were doing something up here, so I came to check,” says Mallory. She regards him warily, “Clearly I made the right decision.” 

A bitter chuckle escapes him. “Clearly you are dedicated to your new role guarding the spawn of Satan.” He gestures around the room, “Well then, what do you think? Does it fulfill all your expectations of what a Satanic Ritual should look like?”

“I guess so,” she says hesitantly. Her expression is predictably troubled, but then she crouches down, which he does not expect, and motions vaguely at his wounded arms. “Is that necessary though? I mean I’m no expert but… don’t people usually kill other living things as a sacrifice or something?”

He has no ready answer for that. “Or something,” he says, “but nothing is more potent for Satan than his own blood.”

“Hm,” is all she says in response. She holds her palms out. “Can I?”

“May I,” he corrects automatically.

For some reason that makes her smile. He doesn’t like it. “May I?”

Perhaps it’s because he’s curious despite himself that he says, “Go ahead.”

Gently, she waves her hands over his wounds and a bizarre sensation washes over him. Warmth courses through his bloodstream; it is different from the blistering heat of hellfire. His wounds begin to knit together, before closing up with nary a mark in sight.

“Fascinating,” he mutters and looks past his healed wounds to see the witch with an even more prominent smile. He’s about to ask her what exactly about this situation pleases her so much when one of the snakes (who had all, up to now, retreated to the sides of the room with Mallory’s approach) suddenly coils up and strikes, jumping at him. Mallory falls back in surprise, but he catches it neatly in his hand and it wriggles, hissing, showing off its fangs.

“I got it,” he says to it in annoyance and throws it aside. He gets up and asks her, “Are you going to keep me under surveillance or can I go change?” With a tilt of his head, he adds, “or are you going to surveil me while I change?”

Embarrassment flashes across her face, but she keeps her eyes resolutely on his. “No, I—there’s food ready downstairs, if you want some.”

He stares at her for a moment, just a moment, and tries to take her all in—all that power packed in such a small frame, all that ferocity held back by what seemed to be compassion or some misguided sense of fairness—before throwing his head back in a harsh laugh. “Why Mallory,” he says, “I do believe that you are trying to save me.” He chuckles a few times before his tone suddenly drops, “I almost regret having to tell you that there’s no point in all that. I’m quite unsalvageable at this point.”

She stares at him, furrowed brow and wide, limpid, eyes, their brightness emphasized by the absence of those clunky eyeglass frames. At this distance, he can even count her eyelashes, which lay stark against her skin. “What?”

“Your actions clearly show that you wish to save me.” The way he says that makes it obvious how distasteful he finds the whole idea. “Bring me into the light, away from the influence of my father, yada, yada, yada, and so on and so forth. But it’s best to put such ideas out of your head. The light has never done anything for me nor does it have anything I desire. The darkness on the other hand…” He smiles and is pleased to see her shiver slightly. “Believe me, Mallory; there is no point in holding yourself back when facing me. As I once told your eminent Supreme, I _will_ kill every last one of you witches.”

She lets out a shaky breath. “Fine,” she says, “So is that a yes on the food?” When he doesn’t answer, she adds, “Also you’re wrong, I don’t want to save you. But I don’t want to have to hurt you either.”

“Are you sure about that?” he asks. Stepping closer, he casually caresses the side of her face, looking deep into her eyes, filled with stubborn conviction. The frustrating thing is that he actually can’t sense much fear from her at all, only unease at dealing with the unknown, and that is just insulting. “I don’t think I believe you,” he says, “You may wear this cover of saintliness right now, Mallory, but in my experience, it doesn’t take much for that cover to come tumbling down. I’m interested in seeing what destroys yours.” He lightly brushes his fingers around her cheek and she flinches away.

“So be it,” she whispers. She walks to the door, but hesitates at grabbing the handle, and turns back to him. “Like I said, there’s food downstairs,” she says, and then rushes out of the room before he can respond. The door swings shut with a solid ‘click’ and he’s left alone, eyes boring into solid wood.

One snake curls around his leg.

Well, not completely alone.

He collapses back onto the ground and runs his hand along the now-dried blood. “See? I told you she's difficult to deal with,” he says, addressing the snakes, “At this point I’ll have to resort to poison again or killing her in her sleep.” With a discontented sigh he begins to lie down, before suddenly scrambling up, seemingly spurred on by something, a new intrigued gleam in his eyes.

“Of course, why didn’t I think of that earlier?” he asks. The snakes hiss in response.

Wiping the cold sweat off of his back, he heads back to his room to change, more enthused than before. He has a game plan now and on second thought, it is extraordinarily fortunate for him that Mallory is so dedicated to being kind.

Such kindness can easily be used against her.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so much for your kudos and comments!!! This is the most feedback I've gotten on anything I've ever written, so I can't tell you how much this means to me TTwTT you're all the best and I really hope you enjoy this next chapter!

By the time Michael comes down to the dining room, Mallory has already eaten her fourth jelly cube and is contemplating eating a fifth. She shouldn’t be this hungry, given the circumstances, but after a year of starving, she eats more for the small pleasure of having something to chew for longer than five seconds. There are still barrels of poisoned apples that she could possibly un-poison, but her gut roils at the thought of even touching them. The sensation of her innards burning and dissolving into mush had been, to put it bluntly, pretty fucking awful, and she doesn’t relish a repeat experience. The mere memory of it makes her gag and what had made it even worse at the time was the uncertainty and fear fogging up her brain. She hadn’t known anything, not even who she was, and the looming prospect of eternal unfulfillment had been scarier than anything else.

 _I don’t know who I am_ , she remembers thinking desperately before her mind had finally gone blank, _I don’t know what I am._

Frankly, she still doesn’t know. Even with the identity spell gone, there are still gaps in her mind. It was as if her mind was a chest of drawers and while some opened easily, others needed coaxing or wouldn’t budge at all.

Perhaps that was what unnerved her most about Michael, that he seemed to just _know_ so much more than her. About the state of the world, about the workings of the Cooperative, about who he was. In comparison, she was a patchwork of incomplete memories, her motivations half drowned in the rivers of time.

For now, all she is sure about is that she has to keep him down here. But… perhaps that wasn’t enough.

“ _You’re supposed to kill him, Mallory,”_ a voice says in her head. It sounds like Madison and she can picture her sitting down, one leg over the other, a cigarette held primly in one hand, rolling her eyes to the high heavens. _“Do I seriously have to remind you that he’s the Antichrist? He destroyed the world! He killed_ — ** _beep_** _!”_ Startled, Mallory’s heart almost jumps out of her chest; like a TV blistering static, Madison’s mouth moves, but only buzzes and crackles come out. She tries shaking her head a few times in an attempt to ‘reset’ herself, but when nothing works, she leans back in her chair with a sigh.

She’s supposed to kill him. But _can_ she? So far, she’s been able to fight against his attacks, but she’s sure he can fight against hers as well. From their encounters so far, it’s clear that they’re fairly evenly matched. But more than that…

More than that…

…he was just such a _child._

Salvaged from one of her memory drawers was a faint recollection of Madison saying that Michael had grown into an adult overnight when he was only four years old. In that case, how old was he now? There was something so young about him, about his expressions, his mannerisms. The way he corrected her grammar, the way he gave into his temper tantrums, and then tried to intimidate her afterwards as a way to compensate. Sure, it was a corrupted kind of youthfulness, but a youthfulness nonetheless. She is reminded of certain children she used to know, children who tried to be grownups too early, who were forced to do so because of circumstances, because they were growing slower than their scarred skeletons, and because of adults who disregarded their right to a childhood in the first place.

No, she should stop. This was a dangerous line of thought. She knew that and yet…

 _You can’t identify with him_ , she thinks. _Whatever happened to him, Michael isn’t—wasn’t—a normal child._

But then, she hadn’t been one either.

For some reason, the memories of her childhood are especially faint, but there are certain things she still remembers. For example, she remembers healing animals in front of people who had been terrified of her afterwards. She remembers her mother’s garden, yielding a bountiful harvest, ten times bigger than that of the others around them. She remembers being hit, the _crack_ of the slap somehow more impactful than the actual physical force of it. She remembers being in shock, only aware of the stinging burn spreading across her cheek. She had clutched herself, staring at the ground, asphalt and clumps of dirt. The woman, towering over her, had shook her by the shoulder.

 _“What did you say?”_ she’d hissed, and Mallory just wanted to run and hide.

A small noise escapes from her mouth and she belatedly realizes there are tears in her eyes. She hurriedly rubs them away.

Admittedly, a part of her just doesn’t want to give in. The way Michael had been so certain she’d kill him—she almost wants to prove him wrong. Killing him almost seemed too simple of an end for him.

As she goes back to prodding the fifth jelly cube with her fork, she hears the familiar methodical rhythm of footsteps sound through the hall and braces herself.

He’s not as cleaned up as she expected him to be. After his little declaration upstairs, Mallory had thought he’d stride in with his usual commanding and polished manner, ready with an array of nefarious schemes to trip her up and put her at his mercy. But the man who steps into the room is more subdued than that. There’s something docile about his expression, haggard and resigned. His hair is unbrushed, even tangled in certain places, and he’s taken his coat off, leaving him in a simple black button-down shirt. He looks smaller like that, she thinks. Younger. More human.

Stepping up to the table, he eyes the plate of jelly cubes with a disturbingly placid expression. “Back to gelatin, I see,” he says, “I suppose this is all we have to eat?”

“There are some poisoned apples left in the storage room, if that’s what you want,” she replies casually.

His gaze turns to her and yep, there’s that tinge of imperiousness that’s been missing. It demands her attention and she feels her chin rise to the challenge. “Have you ever considered that perhaps, as the Antichrist, I don’t have to eat?”

“I don’t know if you _have_ to eat,” she says, “but I know that you do, at least once every day. You never ate with the others, but you always asked for a plate to be sent up to your room. The grays would talk about it sometimes,” she adds, answering the silent question on his face.

At that, his eyes coolly rake her up and down, stopping somewhere at the collar of her dress. She tells herself not to fidget, but her body betrays her nevertheless and there’s a flush rising at her neck. His lip curls.

“Of course,” he says, “I’d almost forgotten for a second that you were a gray. I say ‘almost’ because well, it’s difficult to overlook that fashion abomination.” He pulls out the chair across from hers and sits down. Leaning forward, he gestures at her outfit in a somewhat careless manner, and then props his chin on his hand. “I’m surprised you haven’t taken this opportunity to change out of that thing.”

She actually had changed, just into another gray uniform. The smell of vomit on the one before had made her feel nauseous. There’s no need to tell him that though, so she simply remarks, “I don’t mind these clothes. They’re simpler than the purple ones, and I don’t really think any of them look nice.”

That makes him smirk, bringing out the apples of his cheeks to a devastating effect. He almost looks like a cherub and he would, if it wasn’t for his long, straight hair. All the cherubs Mallory had ever seen in church had short, bouncy curls. “No, that they don’t,” he says. There’s a small pause, during which Mallory wonders whether he’s the one who designed the costumes, in order to torture them with endless ugly clothing, but that seems to require an unnecessary amount of effort to put into something so asininely petty. While she thinks this, he leans back and inspects his nails. “Tell me, Mallory, did you like being a gray?” he asks without warning.  

“No, I didn’t,” she answers.

“Hm,” he says. He sounds almost bored. “No, I imagine it wouldn’t be very enjoyable having to serve all the vacuous wastes of space who used to live here, would it?” At that moment, something seems to dawn on him; he jerkily looks up and pushes his seat back. “Wait a second,” he says, eyes flitting around the room. “Where are their corpses? I don’t remember anyone cleaning them up. Unless—” He sweeps into the music room, where they had bobbed for apples and died in their gruesome ways, before sweeping back in, ten times as quick. His face is alight with a fervor; blue eyes shining, he speaks rapidly, “—unless, we aren’t actually in the real, physical Outpost 3, but a mental visualization of it, a dream realm that you’ve put us in—”

“—I crystallized them,” she says. A part of her feels bad, cutting off his hopes like this, but it’d be worse to let him believe otherwise.

“You—what?” he asks, mouth agape in confusion. She can’t imagine he wears that expression very often.

“I crystallized them,” she repeats. She gets up from her chair and walks out the room. “If you want, I can show you.”

In a rare show of compliance, he follows her quietly up to what used to be Venable’s office. Hand on the door knob, she warns him, “Just to let you know, it’s pretty bright inside.” She leads him in slowly, watching his eyes widen at the sight.

Venable’s office, like all the other rooms in the Outpost, was only furnished with dark wood furniture and drab beige or purple fabrics. The dull, gloomy atmosphere was further emphasized by the poor lighting, the fireplace and primitive torches. Walking in there made one think, _the end of the world indeed_. Mallory had spent hours in there cleaning at Ms. Mead’s command, and she always ended each session with a feeling of hopelessness.

Within such a setting, the crystals are even more brilliant, their white glow almost blinding, overwhelming the senses. She had basked in their light after creating them, starving for it after the past months of being underground. There are around twenty of them, arranged in rows of five. Standing upright, they resemble coffins or graves, with splinters appearing to grow up from the ground, clustering in the middle, before tapering off and spiraling up to a pointed tower just below the ceiling. They are translucent, allowing Michael to see the people contained inside, one per crystal. Silently, he slinks around like a cat from one end of the room to the other. His face, ethereal in their glow, is unreadable.

“There aren’t that many purples left,” Mallory says quietly, “most of them are grays who also died from the apples.”

Carefully, he touches one before hastily retracting his hand. He moves as if he’d been burned.

“Why did you do this?” he asks. His voice, like his face, exposes little. “Or perhaps I should ask, _how?_ ”

Mallory takes her time answering. She walks up to one of the crystals near the door. This one contains Abby, one of the other grays who she’d kind of became friends with during the last eighteen months. Born and raised in Minnesota, she had moved to Massachusetts for college, and had slowly worked her way up to Executive Housekeeper in the Boston Ritz-Carlton. Being the favorite of several VIPs was what had gotten her the ticket to Outpost 3. Not a very good deal at all, but it beat being dead, she had once joked. Her face was strangely serene under the crystal; her normally flushed cheeks were pale, and her brown hair splayed out around her head, seemingly frozen in time.  

“I couldn’t just leave their corpses out there,” she says, “They deserved a burial. But it’s not like we could bury them either so… I just asked my magic to help them.”

She cautiously turns to face him and sees him squinting at her slightly, as if trying to decipher her. “You could’ve burned them,” he says, “But—oh I see. You’re thinking of bringing them back to life.” Now enlightened, his forehead smooths over, and his gaze takes on a more anticipatory gleam.

It is harder to think while facing the intense blue of his eyes. Somehow, they are even more striking in this light. She can only try to answer carefully. “I was, yes. But I’ve decided not to.”

“Why not? It’d be less lonely than just having the two of us here.” He slinks closer (and she has to fight the urge to step back), somehow managing to cross the distance between them in less than two quick strides, and whispers, “We can keep Venable dead, if you’re worried about her.”

“No,” she blurts out. Her throat, suddenly dry, protests, and she has to cough a couple times before continuing, during which she can feel Michael’s gaze burning like lasers through her head. God she’s such an idiot. “That’s not the reason. I just don’t think there’s much point in doing it.”

Michael silently tips his head to the side. “And why is that?”

“Well, we can’t leave the outpost, can we?” she says, heart thudding in her chest. Is it just her or is he closer than he was before? “None of us can. And it’s not like our food supply is increasing. So there isn’t much point in bringing them back to life unless the barrier spell is broken.”

Eyes hardening, Michael laughs once, harshly, before slamming his hand onto the wall at the side of her face, caging her in. He looms in close, so close that she can feel his warmth radiating from his skin, so close that his hair tickles her cheeks. She smells flowers. His husky voice easily fills up the narrow space between them. “You don’t know if _they_ can’t leave. It might just be the two of us who are trapped by your spell. You also don’t know if other people can come _into_ the outpost or if the barrier works in both directions. There’s a very easy way to find out, however.” And with that, he takes a step back, allowing Mallory to breathe again, and points to the crystals. “Revive one of them and see what happens.”

Everything about the way he says that, his tone, his posture, makes it very clear that it is an order.

She refuses. “No,” she says, “I won’t put them in danger like that.”

He laughs again. “Danger? You do know where they are, right? They’re in hell, which is hardly a safe place, I would think.”

“At least in hell, they’re already dead,” she says. A wave of exhaustion suddenly hits her. Her head’s starting to hurt, which isn’t surprising considering the strain she’s been under these past few hours. She needs this conversation to end soon. “Here, anything can happen. Plus,” she looks up at him warily, “they’ll be away from you.” As she expected, his face darkens, but he doesn’t say anything, so she continues, “and you… you like to manipulate people. You’re very good at it. You tried to do it to me and you probably did it to Gallant and maybe even Coco—”

“—oh please, Coco was too empty-headed to manipulate—”

 _Coco was one of the people who helped capture Ms. Mead_ , she almost says. The words burn in her throat, but she just barely manages to quash it inside her chest. This was not the right time to bring that up (not that there was ever going to be a right time); if there was anything she’d realized while observing Michael, it was that Ms. Mead was off-limits. Bringing her up in any way was likely to put him into a rage and that was the last thing she needed right now.

 _Like a child protecting his mother,_ she thinks.

“Even so,” she says instead, “I’m not bringing any of them back to life until I can trust you not to hurt them.”

“Fine,” he snaps, the hard edge of frustration unmistakable. He looms over her with a peeved expression. “I see how it is. How about this then? I’ll make you a deal. Undo the spell, right now, and I promise that I won’t hurt any of the precious little citizens here. I’ll even let you and the other witches go free. Not completely free of course, but I’ll give you, say, a month’s head start.

“You’re lying,” she whispers.

“Scout’s honor,” he says and brandishes a bright smile.  

Mallory refuses to even distinguish that with a response. “Even if you were telling the truth, I don’t know how to undo this spell. I tried a few times before you woke up. No matter what I do, no matter how much I want it to, the barrier just won’t go down.”

“You’re lying.”

“Scout’s honor,” she repeats back at him, “And I actually was a Girl Scout.” For only a few days, but again he doesn’t need to know that. Seeing his stony face, she sighs, “If I could’ve let the barrier down, don’t you think I would’ve left before you woke up? That way you would’ve been trapped down here by yourself.”

“Not necessarily,” he remarks dryly, “being the little martyr you are you could’ve just decided you had to stay here to protect them from me.” A little wave at the crystals makes it clear who he’s referring to. “Even if they’re already dead,” he adds with a derisive sort of chuckle. He swiftly turns his stare back to her, seemingly searching for something. She freezes and immediately focuses on the flecks of pale blue in his eyes, hoping that he finds nothing incriminating in her expression. “You really won’t revive any of them?” he finally asks.

“No,” she says.

Surely expecting that answer, he gives a small, almost mocking nod, says, “Then I’ll bring one back myself,” and pivots towards the crystals, raising his hands in a flourish.

She rushes forward to pull him back, grabbing the arm closest to her. “That won’t work,” she says firmly, “So long as they’re inside those crystals, you won’t be able to reach their souls.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. She realizes that when his muscles tense under her hands, but by then it’s too late. He roughly grabs one of her hands and lifts it off of him, forcing it up and then, flipping her around, brings it down at an angle behind her that causes her to cry out in pain. She can feel him shaking, not only from his hands, but also from his voice; when he speaks, the anger is barely restrained, it crackles under every syllable, and there’s a snarl running underneath. “You’ve cast the same spell Cordelia did, haven’t you?” he says, “The same one she used on my Ms. Mead!” He forces her arm down even harder and she has to bite her lip to smother any further cries. “All you coven witches are the same!” he spits, “You all must’ve felt so smart, staying down during the bombs, even sneaking you into an outpost. I’ve never even _seen_ you before in the Coven. Clever Cordelia, she kept you hidden from me, didn’t she? So that I wouldn’t know—but whatever it is you have planned, it’s not going to work, it’s not—”

“Michael,” she says, desperately wracking her brain for a way to defuse this situation, “Michael, breathe.”

“Shut up!” he snaps, and she can feel his breath hit the back of her neck. “You witches brought this onto yourselves. I didn’t even think about a nuclear apocalypse until you killed Ms. Mead. And you know what your Supreme said to me, after I discovered her body?” He laughs bitterly. “She asked me to stop. To join you. She said she saw the light in me and that I didn’t have to follow the path my father made for me. She said that _after_ killing the one person who’d ever loved me!”

 _Fuck it_ , Mallory thinks, and she blindly throws her head backwards as hard as she can. She hits something, which is promising, and hears him hiss, which is even more so, and uses the momentum to swing herself around and lessen the pressure on her arm. Unfortunately, Michael’s grip is tight, and he shoves her onto the ground, his other hand wrapping around her throat, cutting off her air.  Wheezing, she calls for her magic, and with the last bit of her energy, pushes him off of her, flinging him into one of the crystals, which he hits with a loud thud, before sliding down onto the ground in a heap.

Black spots appearing in her eyes, Mallory forces herself to get up, shuffling forward to lean against the wall. She hopes strongly that Michael is out for the count, otherwise this is going to end very badly for her.

A series of grunts and groans dashes those hopes. “You—” Michael rasps. His breathing sounds rough and uneven. “You bitch, I—I think my ribs are broken.” Well that’s something at least. The latter part of his sentence sounds slightly confused, as if he’s never broken his ribs before. He probably hasn’t, she thinks, and can’t help but feel a bit smug that she’s the first to succeed.

“Well you broke my arm, I think,” she says and gives it a nudge just to see if—yeah, yeah it is. And her shoulder hurts like a motherfucker.

The two of them both fall silent. Mallory wonders if he, like her, is at a loss on how to proceed.

After a long bout of silence, he finally asks, “Who _are_ you?”

Isn’t that the million-dollar question. “I told you,” she says tiredly, “I don’t know.”

He scoffs, “That line won’t work anymore, Mallory. The identity spell’s off now, it’s time to drop the pretenses.”

“There are no pretenses,” she snaps, “I don’t know what you want me to tell you. I’m a witch. You know that I’m a witch.”

“Even at the height of her powers, Cordelia couldn’t oppose me,” he says, “So what’s special about you?” When Mallory stubbornly refuses to answer, he grumbles, “You witches…”

And then there’s silence again. She sighs and shifts her body so that it hurts less. She’s about to fall asleep, she thinks. The lights dance before her eyes, white crystal mingling with fluttering flames and Mallory faintly wonders if this was the closest heaven could get to hell.

She can’t help but ask, “Would you have said yes then?”

“What?”

“If Cordelia had asked you before killing Ms. Mead,” she says, seeing Michael’s body go rigid, “or without killing her at all. Would you have said yes?”

He snarls, “Go to hell,” and, coughing as he does so, shakily gets up. He staggers towards her, but she doesn’t try to move away. She really has used up the last of her energy and her limbs feel like lead. “I was going to wait to try this out,” he says, kneeling down beside her, “but you’ve forced my hand.”

Michael places his hand on her forehead. And that is the last thing she sees, as her vision goes black.

 

* * *

 

Michael remembers, back when his grandmother still loved him (although, in the spirit of honesty, she’d never _really_ loved him), that she would heap praises upon praises upon him. “What a handsome little angel you are,” she’d say; sometimes she’d even call him a “handsome little devil”, all the while smoothing his hair and patting his cheeks, with all the pride and saccharine sweetness her Southern belle mannerisms could effuse. “Just like your father,” she’d murmur, “with that face, you’ll have the world adore you.”

And adoration he had had. From his grandmother to the warlocks, to Madelyn and the other Satanists, they had turned to him with shining eyes of worship and awe. But adoration was not love; adoration was a shallow thing that lacked understanding and comprehension. Adoration could quickly turn into something else—into fear or hatred or disgust. Adoration was a cheap knock-off and he didn’t particularly want it, although he’d realized long ago that it came with the territory of being the Antichrist.

The only one who’d truly loved him was Ms. Mead, but he’d been without her, the _real_ her, for too long and he hated it. Sometimes he searched into the darkness that was his father, wondering if the all-consuming bloodlust and hatred he found there was his form of love. 

When he sleeps, a part of his subconscious whispers a bedtime story. A fairytale. A “once upon a time” kind of tale, like the ones his grandmother used to read to him.

“Once upon a time,” he hears her say, “in a beautiful house surrounded by roses, there lived a prince and his grandmother. The grandmother loved the prince very much, but was frightened of the beast she saw that was growing inside him. The little prince, not knowing any better, continued to feed the beast, helping it grow. Slowly the beast grew bigger and bigger and bigger, and one day it overtook the prince's body. By then the grandmother could no longer bear it, and the prince found her corpse, cold to the touch. She had taken her own life and, by doing so, had placed a curse upon him."

"What kind of curse?" he hears himself ask. 

"So long as the beast lived, the prince could never love another and another could never love him. The grandmother had doomed him to be alone, forever.”

"But that's not fair!" 

"Oh Michael," his grandmother croons, "Life isn't fair." 

As he cries, the scent of roses blows in through the window. His grandmother disappears. Unlike the usual fairytales, there is no “the end”, only the unforgiving ennui of a prolonged existence.


End file.
